The purpose of a personal assistant isn’t to fit people into your calendar. It’s to filter them out. They serve as a barrier to your time, not an enabler for other people to claim it. I don’t see how an AI can meaningfully accomplish that any better than simply just making yourself more difficult to reach.
> The purpose of a personal assistant isn’t to fit people into your calendar. It’s to filter them out. They serve as a barrier to your time, not an enabler for other people to claim it.
Scheduling in a larger org and/or with multiple equally busy people is a non-trivial, complex task; it makes sense to dedicate resources to the task. Good Executive Assistants are generally fairly smart folks, in my experience.
When the scale is substantially more and involves objects as well it evolves into multi-million $ ERM (Enterprise Resource Management) systems.
I'm a pretty busy person professionally. When I feel like I'm being pushed to "scale" my time and attention, I take that as a signal to do the opposite: do less, and do those remaining things more meaningfully.
Trying to do more is a losing game, and AI assistants just paper over that. We all have finite time and attention. I think a pragmatic engineering approach is the right one here: consider that as a non-negotiable constraint, a fact of the physical world, not something to magic away.
This is it right here. I've long thought about this one and whether I should bother with an AI agent that can do all of this stuff for me, but the reality is both what you said and I'm not rich enough.
Do I want the AI Agent to take my bank account and automatically pay some bill every month in full? What if you go a little over that month due to an emergency expense you weren't prepared for? And it's not a matter of "I don't have enough in my bank account for this one time charge", but it's "I don't have enough in my bank account for this charge and 3 others coming at the end of the month." type deal.
Agents aren't going to be very good at that. "Hey I paid $3,000 on your credit card in order to prevent you from incurring interest. Interest is really bad to carry on a credit card and you should minimize that as much as possible." Me: "Yeah but I needed that money for rent this month." Agent: "Oh, yeah! I should have taken that into account! It looks like we can't reverse the charge for the payment."
We’ve had computing technology that clearly understands what the user wants to do. It’s called a command line interface. No guessing, no recommendations, no dark patterns, no bullshit.
It's really hard to consider any kind of web dev as "engineering." Outcomes like this show that they don't have any particular care for constraints. It's throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall YOLO programming.
There are plenty of web devs who care about performance and engineering quality. But caring about such things when you work on something like a news site is impossible: These sites make their money through user tracking, and it's literally your job to stuff in as many 3rd-party trackers as management tells you to. Any dev who says no on the basis that it'll slow the site down will get fired as quickly as a chef who get a shift job in McDonalds and tries to argue for better cuisine.
The 3.5mm audio jack is pretty close to engineering perfection on the important dimensions: cheap, fast, and good.
Getting rid of it in favor of Bluetooth-only audio connectivity is creating a problem to sell you a (more expensive, less reliable, less time-tested) solution.
I think you are making a big deal out of nothing: today adoption is tiny but there isn't any coordination problem. Anyone wanting to buy or sell bitcoins, even for very large amount has no problem doing so.
As adoption increases, liquidity (which may be what you allude to when you talk about coordination) will be even better.
I'd also note that facilitating liquity can indeed be a complex problem, but there are people specialized in making money out of it and who therefore have an incentive to continually keep the market liquid, read about "market makers".
You see it in how services have twisted the meaning of "saving" something. Very rarely does it mean actually putting a file on your computer for you to access on your own terms as long as you have possession of it. More often, it just means associating something to your account, which is ultimately subject to the whims of the service provider.
Anyone who's paid attention to the last 15+ years of tech and business knows that it's all about capture and extraction. All the feel-good language about "democratizing" tech or "making the world more open and connected" or "don't be evil" is just a smokescreen for people who want to bring about modern feudalism.
It's hard to see AI as anything but the latest accelerant for that.
I think things are pretty clear. I don’t know when the markets will agree, sadly.
We do know technological advancements will leave the data centers as stranded assets. There’s not enough money in the most optimistic revenue projections to pay for them, and models are simultaneously getting better and cheaper to operate.
Adobe (and similar companies) will either improve or be replaced by vibe coding. I think the assumption a lot of wall street and management is making is that Adobe can replace itself with vibe coding and vibe customer support, and then not be simultaneously out-innovated by a few dozen companies founded by folks they laid off.
Local inference is 6-12 months behind SOTA. If that holds, you can have a 2029 SOTA locally on a Rapberry Pi 8, or 2030 SOTA for $500/month (in 2026 dollars). If 2030 SOTA is qualitatively better at that point, then we’ll be way past AGI, and the economy will be unrecognizable.
It is basically impossible for AI software improvements to devalue the AI compute investments.
It's the other way around, software improvements make the hardware more valuable. Let's say that one unit of compute can generate one unit of value. As the software improves on any of the principal axes (cheaper cost for same quality, or new capabilities that you could previously not get for any price), that same unit of compute will produce more value.
What would threaten those compute investments? Basically order of magnitude improvements in the hardware, but that kind of thing will take longer to happen than the projected lifetime of the hardware. (Or the demand for AI evaporating, but that tends to be an issue of faith that is hard to have a useful discussion on.)
That's assuming all existing LLM investments divided by the all existing LLM usage is net valuable as baseline. But if that is not yet like that, then software improvements may or may not bring those investments over the valuable threshold.
Exactly, my view is intellectually honest because it's falsifiable. I would love to live in a world where tech largely respects and empowers end-users instead of trapping them in engineered dependency. Tech companies just need to act humanely.
I'm not sure I see that with the big tech I'm an end user of, the biggest being Google. I get free search, email, youtube. It's provided a lot of value for me and never really caused problems at that end.
I think the downsides of Google are more driving competitors and companies that have to pay them out of business, like for example the online travel business has suffered because they need to pay a lot to get any customers.
I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe some monopoly laws that make their service worse so others can compete?
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